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Derrick Grose

Arts Alive - 50 views

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    The Arts Alive web site offers a wide range of resources for teachers who want to teach about or with dance, drama or music. The resources range from recordings orchestral performances and interviews with artists to collections of theatrical posters and related lessons about graphic design.
Gerald Carey

It's Alive! - 3 views

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    From the author: "Book two in a three part series, It's Alive explains the scientific theories regarding the origin of life on Earth using captivating illustrations and whimsical rhymes. From the formation of our solar system to the birth of bacteria, you'll learn about the conditions that could have created life, the nature of organic existence, and the beauty of evolution. This book is intended for all ages. If you don't understand everything, don't worry, no one does! That's why I made it rhyme and added lots of pictures."
Michele Brown

The American Revolution - 3 views

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    Use this site to enhance lessons about US History.  Facts, multimedia, and objects are provide to help bring history alive.
Michele Brown

Green Screen Adventures - Smart Stuff for Kids. We Bring Your Stories to Life. - 81 views

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    Make your stories come alive.  Create stories and submit. If your story is picked they will create a video of your story.
Mark Woolley

Literacy Alive - Digital story telling for 21st century learners - 140 views

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    A presentation about "Engaging students with literacy to create powerful, rich multimedia stories that bring their writing to life. " Essentially a movie from a Prezi, it guides teachers through 4 different digital storytelling options and why they are important.
Kimberly LaPrairie

picturing the thirties - 2 views

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    "Picturing the 1930s," a new educational web site created by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in collaboration with the University of Virginia, allows teachers and students to explore the 1930s through paintings, artist memorabilia, historical documents, newsreels, period photographs, music, and video. Using PrimaryAccess, a web-based teaching tool developed at the university's Curry Center for Technology and Teacher Education, visitors can select images, write text, and record narration in the style of a documentary filmmaker. They can then screen their video in a virtual theater. PrimaryAccess is the first online tool that allows students to combine their own text, historical images from primary sources, and audio narration to create short online documentary films linked to social studies standards of learning, said Glen Bull, co-director of the Curry Center. Since the first version was developed in collaboration with U.Va.'s Center for Digital History and piloted in a local elementary school in 2005, more than 9,000 users worldwide have created more than 20,000 short movies. In creating digital documentaries, students embed facts and events in a narrative context that can enhance their retention and understanding of the material, said Curry research scientist Bill Ferster, who developed the application with Bull. Besides increasing their knowledge about the period, "Picturing the 1930s" enhances students' visual literacy skills, Ferster noted, adding that PrimaryAccess "offers teachers another tool to bring history alive."
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Martin Burrett

EarthEcho Expeditions: What's the Catch? - 5 views

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    "Teachers in England are being invited to join a professional development opportunity through EarthEcho International sponsored by the Northrop Grumman Foundation. The 'EarthEcho Expeditions: What's the Catch?' programme leverages the rich Cousteau legacy of exploration and discovery to bring Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education alive for today's 21st-century learners and their educators. The free, expenses-paid opportunity is planned to allow secondary school teachers to participate as Expedition Fellows to learn first-hand from scientists and engineers the consequences of fisheries mismanagement and how this can be changed for the better with new technological approaches and discoveries."
Nigel Coutts

Moving beyond linear plans for learning - The Learner's Way - 7 views

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    An important part of the role of any educator is that of planning learning sequences. Perhaps you are tasked with designing curriculum or more likely you are translating a mandatory curriculum into workable units of learning. The task is complex and there are multiple arrangements. The goal is to design units that connect students with learning in ways that are meaningful and relevant. A well-designed unit of learning fits seamlessly alongside other learning opportunities and the overall sequence of learning should match the learners developing expertise. As we plan units of learning we must consider a great variety of factors which impact the learning we design. Our knowledge of our students and where they are with their learning is crucial and a strong place to start. We also need to know what it is we are required to teach and have a grab bag of pedagogical moves that bring this content alive.
Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 10 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
atitzel

American Civil War Augmented Reality Project - 44 views

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    A fascinating project designed by teachers to use Augmented Reality to make history come alive. Help spread the word to make this a reality.
Michele Brown

Home of CELLS alive! - 53 views

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    interactive science site
H DeWaard

5 Reasons Why Origami Improves Students' Skills | Edutopia - 59 views

  • origami
  • This art form engages students and sneakily enhances their skills -- including improved spatial perception and logical and sequential thinking.
  • Here are some ways that origami can be used in your classroom to improve a range of skills:
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  • Geometry
  • According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2003, geometry was one area of weakness among American students.
  • Origami has been found to strengthen an understanding of geometric concepts, formulas, and labels, making them come alive.
  • Thinking Skills
  • Origami excites other modalities of learning. It has been shown to improve spatial visualization skills using hands-on learning.
  • Fractions
  • Folding paper can demonstrate the fractions in a tactile way.
  • Problem Solving
  • Often in assignments, there is one set answer and one way to get there. Origami provides children an opportunity to solve something that isn't prescribed and gives them a chance to make friends with failure (i.e. trial and error).
  • Origami is a fun way to explain physics concepts. A thin piece of paper is not very strong, but if you fold it like an accordion it will be.
  • Researchers have found that students who use origami in math perform better.
  • STEAM
  • While schools are still catching up to the idea of origami as a STEAM engine (the merging of these disciplines), origami is already being used to solve tough problems in technology.
  • Additionally, the National Science Foundation, one of the government's largest funding agencies, has supported a few programs that link engineers with artists to use origami in designs. The ideas range from medical forceps to foldable plastic solar panels.
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    Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has applications in the modern-day classroom for teaching geometry, thinking skills, fractions, problem solving, and fun science.
trisha_poole

We Don't Need Digital Textbooks, We Just Need Digital Education | Singularity Hub - 0 views

  • Have you ever seen a grassy lawn on a college campus with a multitude of little dirt paths criss crossing it? Each trail is worn by students making the same decision, branching where someone thought to head somewhere new and others followed. That’s the right model for how we should let students teach themselves.
    • trisha_poole
       
      Metaphor for textbooks and learning?
  • We need writers, and filmmakers, and animators, and everyone else who generates educational content. We need editors and watchdogs to evaluate the content and make sure it is good. We need teachers who can hold students hands as they walk their educational path, and who can inspire them to explore areas they may find boring at first. We need supervisors and tests to evaluate how well this system is working. We need parents and communities to decide our expectations for that system. We need all those things.
  • The future of education doesn’t depend on us digitizing and updating textbooks, it will rely on us leaving the textbook format behind entirely.
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  • Every page of Life on Earth will be filled with compelling animations of biological processes, real footage of organisms, and interviews with scientists. The textbook won’t be a dead piece of paper, it will be alive, constantly updated by the latest in scientific understanding. There will likely be homework servers and online forums to connect students together.
Maggie Tsai

Sweeny's Canadawiki Weblog: Make Your Own Wiki Textbook With Web 2.0 - 6 views

  • Web 2.0 services are generating what is truly a personal learning renaissance.Here's a comment from teacher Elizabeth Davis at Classroom 2.0:"Following and reading blogs, participating in ning, contributing to wikis, writing in my blog, I haven't thought this much in years. It truly is an amazing phenomenon. I feel so intellectually alive. I'm inspired and challenged constantly. The blogs I read lead me to question and explore new tools and Websites. I haven't written this much since I was in school. It is all so exciting and energizing. For me, classroom 2.0 could just be about my own growth and learning and that would be enough."A good example of a free Web 2.0 service is Wikispaces. Here's a class wiki made with the service - A Broken World, the World War I wiki of a Grade 9 class. Their teacher comments:You are now "textbook writers." Your goal is to make a better, more interesting textbook than that overweight, boring, 20th Century history textbook you're now using. And to do work of such high quality that you can include it on your resume as another example of your academic skills in your "digital portfolio."Here are some other School 2.0 online services:* Diigo- for "social bookmarking" of Web sources.* Blogger - to create a class weblog.* Ning - to build your own social network]
Lauren Mitchell

Thoreau's Walking - 2 - 0 views

  • "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields."
    • Lauren Mitchell
       
      Do you think Thoreau would get one of those spray tans?
  • Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.
  • Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
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  • omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks
  • In Literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the Schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild-the mallard-thought, which, 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west, or in the jungles of the east.
  • I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect.
  • all good things are wild and free
  • The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
  • I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
  • strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle — varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would  be, not a circle, but a
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